OPINION BY GREG RAY
To be insulted by a man credibly accused of fraud and war crimes is a badge of honour. To hear Israel’s widely loathed prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, assert with a straight face that history will harshly judge his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese, is frankly surreal. This piece of Trumpian drivel was delivered by an amoral political opportunist whose machinations have caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people and turned Israel into a pariah state in the eyes of many.
Netanyahu is furious because Australia dared to follow the lead of France, the UK and Canada in formally recognising Palestine and also because it refused an entry visa to right-wing Israeli extremist Simcha Rothman.
History would remember Albanese as “a weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews,” Netanyahu ranted on the right-wing propaganda platform formerly known as Twitter. Naturally his venom was amplified by Australia’s right-wing press outlets and their leashed pets in the Liberal Party. The same media that ran a fake story in the immediate wake of the recognition announcement, allegedly sourced from a Hamas leader who is actually being held incommunicado in Israeli custody. Truth has long since stopped being a consideration in the biased eyes of many media players.
The fact is, the recognition of Palestine is a token gesture that does little if anything to prevent Netanyahu from continuing his savage campaign of genocide. He has no intention of allowing Palestine to survive as a national identity. He remains in power at the whim of a coalition of vicious extremists who want Palestine erased and its land and resources distributed to their supporters. He also survives in power at the whim of US President Donald Trump, a man at least as narcissistic, grasping, opportunistic, ruthless and sociopathic as Netanyahu himself.
As the leader of Israel’s political opposition, Yair Lapid, declared in response to Netanyahu’s rant: “The thing that strengthens a leader in the democratic world today most is a confrontation with Netanyahu, the most politically toxic leader in the Western world. It is unclear why Bibi is rushing to give the prime minister of Australia this gift.” Israel’s own Haaretz news outlet agreed, stating in its editorial that: “It seems like Netanyahu cannot help himself, drunk on the thrill of this Trump-like anti-diplomacy. He is surely ready and waiting to give the same gift to the next world leader who dares display a moral backbone”.
The two-state solution is dead
Israel also retaliated against Australia by revoking the visas of Australian diplomatic representatives to the Palestinian Authority. Bear in mind, as Haaretz states in its editorial, Israel routinely denies or revokes visas to people critical of its policies and practices with regard to Palestinian people.
As things stand, with the current Israeli leadership and the latest “facts on the ground” – meaning new areas of land appropriated and absorbed since the genocide began – the “two-state solution” is dead. Israel has declared to the world that, no matter what anybody else thinks, Palestine has no right to exist.
If there can be no Palestinian state then what other options exist? Israel as it is currently constituted will not accept the Palestinians as full citizens with all the rights that should go with citizenship. So, no “one-state solution” either. What remains but for the Palestinians not killed in the genocide to be driven into exile? Trump and Netanyahu have made it clear enough that this is their preferred option. Or perhaps, as others have suggested, the survivors can be herded into a de facto concentration camp and, subjected to heavy management by Israel, “encouraged” to leave in dribs and drabs – if they can find other nations to accept them. The historical irony of this scenario is particularly searing.
Netanyahu’s ludicrous invocation of the now threadbare charge of “antisemitism” against the Australian Government does nothing but further sap the power of that once-potent charge. Even as so-called “elites” in government, media and academia rush to impose laws and rules outlawing and suppressing criticism of any and all actions by Israel as “antisemitic”, the vast majority of thinking citizens are angrily and correctly identifying and rejecting that ploy as cynical nonsense.
Those in Australia and elsewhere now loudly declaring their uncritical allegiance to Benjamin Netanyahu and his bloodthirsty policies are backing the wrong side. They are the ones who, along with Netanyahu and his extremist supporters, will be harshly judged by history. The kowtowing politicians now attacking Anthony Albanese – with their eyes fixed on mischief-making Murdochian headlines – are especially beneath contempt.
Not that the Australian Government will escape unscathed when the time for judging comes. Its supine acceptance of the genocide is a matter for shame it will share with many other cowed nations that lacked the moral courage to state a simple truth when it really mattered. So far it can be said of the government that what it saw fit to do was too little and much too late.
